Articles

Red Alert 3: Chris Corry on Soviet Unrealism

EA's Chris Curry discusses the cold, logical decision-making that led to parachuting bears and Commie girls in hot pants.

"There's never been a shortage of silliness in Red Alert," says Chris Corry.

The executive producer for Red Alert 3 is taking a quick break from back-to-back presentations at Electronic Arts' pre-E3 event. We're seated in a display area filled with somber red mood lighting and garish displays featuring Natasha, the busty Soviet commando who acts as the game's iconic character and is played in-game by EliteXC MMA champion and "American Gladiator" star Gina Carano. The ambience was the perfect counterpoint for our discussion of the team's decision-making when it came to designing the graphic look for the latest Red Alert.

"Red Alert 3 actually has much more in common visually with Red Alert 2 than with the original Red Alert," Corry began. The original game began as a speculative offshoot of the Command & Conquer universe in which Albert Einstein uses an experimental time machine to travel back in time and eliminate Adolf Hitler when he was a young man. Unfortunately the resulting failure of the Nazi Party takeover in Germany doesn't eliminate World War II, it just shuffles the players a bit with the Allies taking on an aggressively expansive Soviet Union under the murderous leadership of Joseph Stalin. The sequel moves the timeframe up to the 1990s and ratchets up the silliness quotient when Yuri, a powerful Russian psychic, pushes the Soviet Union into a war with the U.S.-led Allies.

Corry points out that while the original game certainly had plenty of over-the-top elements (most notably the successful implementation of Nikola Tesla's far-flung applications for electricity) it nonetheless tried to keep at least one foot in plausibility. Red Alert 2, on the other hand, widened the schism between the two branches of the C&C family tree by throwing in elements like psychic clone soldiers, mind-controlled squid and dolphin naval units. Red Alert 3 is upping the ante still further with its legions of parachuting bears and Soviet commandos in very short shorts. "We're definitely trying to up the humor quotient [in Red Alert 3]," Corry said.

As Natasha is the iconic character for Red Alert 3, so too is the artwork of the Soviet Union the major style-setter for the game. "We definitely get a lot of traction by emphasizing the Soviets," Corry said. As such the team drew first on the vast well of Soviet propaganda art the country produced prior to its collapse in 1991. "There are certainly elements of 'Soviet Realism' in the art style, but keep in mind, Soviet propaganda didn't stand still after World War II," Corry said. "We're drawing more from the Soviet Union's later years in terms of our art and updating them to make sure the game stands out visually as a 'modern' game." The team is also pulling from the supersaturated retro-futurist stylings of films such as Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to bring a bit of "yesterday's future" to the game's Soviet military.